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Under pressure to revive the sagging fortunes of ABC, Disney Chairman/CEO Michael Eisner last week unveiled a plan that merges the management of the broadcast network with Disney-owned cable networks--daypart by daypart--and apparently spells the end of ABC as a discreet business.

"Each one of our dayparts at the ABC network will be run horizontally with the same businesses in cable," Eisner explained at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York.

"The people that run The Disney Channel, Toon Disney and Playhouse Disney [Anne Sweeney] will also run ABC broadcast Saturday morning," he said. "The people that run daytime at ABC [Brian Frons] will run SoapNet, and the people that run the ABC prime time schedule [Susan Lyne and Lloyd Braun] will run ABC Family."

The new strategy will create "national duopolies," Eisner said.

The plan is not sitting well with ABC affiliates, whose board just concluded a new two-year affiliation agreement with the network (see box, page 8). The affiliates were also grumbling about Eisner's comment that, going forward, Disney will focus on promoting two "core brands": Disney itself and ESPN. And ABC? Well, it's a brand, but not a core brand. …

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